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A comment on U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in person. Parent comment

Re:U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in p... by wtallis on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @10:33PM (#19497751)
A properly executed Boy Scout program[1] should give adolescents a lot of unstructured time and leave them with the sense that they spent a weekend hanging out with their friends having fun. It's only at the Cub Scout level where it's appropriate for adults to be planning and leading a highly structured weekend of activities. When I take my troop camping, even if there's a fixed plan for an activity during the day (eg. if we've hired a whitewater rafting outfitter for the day), by 4 or 5PM on Saturday we're back in camp and the scouts' time is their own from then until mid-morning Sunday when they need to be packed up and ready for the drive home. They're still loosely supervised by adults, but there's no adult telling them when to start cooking dinner or when to go to bed.

[1] The program is officially no longer known as Boy Scouts in the US, now that it's starting to go co-ed.

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Re:U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in p... by PascLeRasc on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @11:12AM (#19501619)
In the Boy Scouts troop I was in, no one was allowed to spend time at the parents/adult leaders tent. There's several obvious reasons for this, but one is to force kids, especially those who have a parent volunteering, to spend time away from them and learn some independence. I think it was a great policy.
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Re:U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in p... by sanderjd on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @05:17PM (#19506123)
Yep, this is totally right and an important part of the program. But still not a substitute for spending unstructured time with peers. If nothing else, teenagers should be spending time with possible love interests, flirting, saying the wrong things, saying the right things, figuring out why which is which, that sort of thing. For the large majority of kids that wasn't going to happen at BSA events. Maybe that will change with the broadening to include girls, but I suspect that sort of stuff will be frowned on rather than encouraged; it's just not the goal of the program.
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Re:U.S. teens are spending less time with their friends in p... by sanderjd on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @05:12PM (#19506071)
I agree with all of this and spent my youth as part of a really great troop that did lots of great youth-led events. It was a wonderful enriching experience that has had lasting value in my adult life. But it was not a replacement for all the time I spent hanging out shooting the shit with my friends. Both things were really important to me.
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